Wednesday, May 03, 2006

trading in my gills...

Slowly, cautiously, Medieval Woman emerges from the blogless cave (a.k.a. end of the semester hoopla) that has been her home for so long....she stretches....throws a few rocks at the moon....and looks around in the blogosphere and sees.....that all the medievalists have gone to K'zoo! Have fun, guys - wish I could join you! If someone would request anything danceable by the Jackson 5 ("ABC"?) on my behalf at the conference dance, I'd consider it quite an honor...

I have to say that I'm glad prepping a conference paper is not on my (rapidly diminishing) "to do" list right now. I do have to give finals and collect final papers (and grade them all) but I still have a couple of weeks left on that. Also, I'm giving a little party for my last class on Monday - the Paston Letters always go down better with a slice of pizza.

Then there is:- our graduation (the Dutchman and I will happily walk together)- trip to find a new place to live in Canada- fun trip to St. Croix in June (the best use of our wedding money I could ever imagine - who needs a new dining room table?)

I have also had the idea to make up a summer syllabus for myself - yep, I'm actually assigning myself READING for the summer - complete with due dates, etc. This is the only way that I'll ever get anything done. Sure, I'll probably end up completing about half of it (maybe 2/3) but I do better with arbitrary deadlines and I want to make good use of this summer. I have set reasonable goals and focused reading assignments - even though I should sit down and read Augustine's Confessions (I'm ashamed to say I've only read small bits), that's not really going to advance my project as I see it moving now. So, my goal is to get a much better handle on how I'm going to be revising my dissertation into a book. Not that I'm going to be cranking out book chapters and sending them off to presses or anything - but I want to have a much better handle on my argument before next year's job market - more than just "Well, my diss was on X, and Y is where I see my book project going". I know which chapter(s) I'm going to be shelving for the time being and which I will definitely be taking forward - but I want to talk about the texts as just a few examples of a larger phenomenon rather than simply patterns/similarities that emerge when you look at these specific texts - does that make any sense? It doesn't for me either - this is what this summer's all about.

Whew! No small feat - but it will be fun to try - take a break from teaching and concentrate on my stuff.

5 Comments:

Heya - I've been lurking intermittently and thought I'd make myself known, since I, too, have been Left Behind. On HP7, I don't think we know. I think there's time for The City of God, though, if you want to work that in after you finish the Confessions.

Glad I'm not the only one! It's nice to hear from you, Tiruncula - if I can make it through the necessary sections of Rita Copeland's "Rhetoric, Hermeneutics and translation in the Middle Ages" I'll check out The City of God (*thud*) Her work is so smart and dense, though - it's like an intellectual bloodletting - you feel kind of woozy afterwards...

I remember very clearly the experience of (not) reading Copeland for my field exams. My primary reaction to that book: the print is WAY too small. Finally, ten days or so before my exam, I said to my most malleable committee member, "If I buy you coffee and dessert, will you tell me how exactly this is relevant to my work?" We had a very nice coffee and he ended up admitting that actually, it wasn't.